Beto O’Rourke made it clear during Thursday night’s Democratic debate in Houston: He’s not just going for woke. He’s going for broke. And he may have irrevocably damaged his campaign in the process after the answer he gave on gun control.

ABC News debate moderator David Muir asked O’Rourke to confirm he was planning on confiscating guns as president during a segment on mass shootings and gun control. The former El Paso Congressman answered “Hell yes!”:

MUIR: Some of the stage have suggested a voluntary buy-back for guns in this country. You have gone further. You said, quote, “Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell them to the government, all of them. You know that critics call this confiscation. Are you proposing taking away their guns and how would this work?

BETO O’ROURKE: I am, if it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield. If the high impact, high velocity, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that so you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers. When we see that being used against children and in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15 and that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time. Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore.

MUIR: Congressman, thank you.

O’ROURKE: And, I want to say this — I’m listening to the people of this country, the day after I proposed doing that, I went to a gun show in Conway, Arkansas. To meet with those who were selling AR-15s and those who were buying those weapons and you might be surprised, there was some common ground there. Folks who said, “I would give that up, cut it to pieces, I don’t need this weapon to hunt, to defend myself. It is a weapon of war.” So, let’s do the right thing, but let’s bring everyone in America into the conversation. Republicans, Democrats, gun owners and non-gun owners alike.

Watch Beto answer Muir’s question below:

His campaign is even selling a t-shirt with the “Hell yes” phrase on it:

Unfortunately, Muir didn’t follow up with Beto on the issue of enforcement (would police have to go door to door?), but any law-abiding gun owner watching the debate in Texas and beyond can read between the lines:

He would take guns by force if necessary.

Outside of the Democratic party’s ghoulish third trimester stance on abortion on demand, Beto O’Rourke’s gun control policy proposal is arguably the most extreme position expressed by any of the Democratic presidential contenders.

It is unconstitutional, would absolutely be challenged in court, and would likely get struck down by the Supreme Court if it even made it that far.

It is also dangerous and, like Meghan McCain said recently, would lead to violence if implemented.

He doesn’t care, though. That’s his plan and he’s sticking to it

If elected, Beto O’Rourke also plans to force banks and credit card companies to, among other things, “Refuse to take part in the sale of assault weapons”:

Banks and credit card companies must: 1⃣Refuse to take part in the sale of assault weapons.2⃣Stop processing transactions for gun sales online & at gun shows without background checks.3⃣Stop doing business with gun & ammo manufacturers who produce or sell assault weapons

Sure, because we all know killers who want to use guns as “weapons of war” use their credit cards when buying guns illegally instead of untraceable cash.

As the Free Beacon noted recently, it appears Beto is in the “screw it” part of his campaign. He has struggled to gain traction in a crowded field for almost the entirety of the time he’s been running for president, and his apologizing for being white and suggestion America was founded on white supremacy are messages that simply haven’t resonated with Democratic voters.

Between that and the mass shooting in El Paso, he’s thrown caution out the window by adopting an “angry man on a mission” demeanor. He no longer seems to care what rural voters think about his positions on the issues.

That angry man demeanor includes routinely accusing President Trump of being a white supremacist whose rhetoric was what led the El Paso shooter to murder 22 innocent people and injure dozens more.

“Living close to work shouldn’t be a luxury for the rich,” the former Texas congressman tweeted Monday. “It’s a right for everyone.”

[…]

“Rich people are going to have to allow — or be forced to allow — lower-income people to live near them,” he said.

Beto can relaunch his campaign as often as he wants to, go even further to the left on core Democratic issues, but it’s not going to make a difference. His candidacy is going nowhere fast, including in his home state of Texas where he is polling in third place behind Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA).

It’s time for him to drop out.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

Oh really, google guru, how much money does he have that is independent of what his wife brought into the marriage? How do they divide the family financial obligations? How much money does he need to live well?

Beto’s dad was a rich, politically well connected judge. That’s why Beto could skate on what obviously should have been a slam dunk drunken driving conviction years ago.

Ironically, Beto’s dad died in El Paso in 2001, when his bicycle was run over by a mexican with a suspended drivers license. (well maybe that’s who it was, a quick check shows that the reports of his death are surprisingly full of holes, which is curious)

NOOOoooo!!! Please, PLEASE stay in the race beta. Actually, I hope as many crazy dems stay in the race as long as absolutely possible. The damage these democrat party candidates are doing to themselves and the democrat brand is going to last well beyond 2020.

Little Beto remarked last night that some high velocity bullets are devastating and prevent the solider in the battlefield from continuing the fight. Well Beto that is the idea.. If one needs to discharge a round in self-defense it should prevent your attacker from continuing the attack.

I guess Beto does not believe in self-defense or that government comes from the consent of the governed.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was never conceived as “The Hunter’s Guarantee”. It was always meant to give the Citizenry the power, the means and the right to resist a tyrannical government and was written when weapons of war were hanging over every farmer’s hearth.
Robert Francis O’rourke at least is honest enough to say what Citizens and gun owners have known. There is not support for a Constitutional repeal of the Second Amendment, so extra-constitutional means will be necessary. Again, this is not about Guns. It is about control.

If the high impact, high velocity, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that so you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers.

OK, someone who knows more about this please correct me if I’m wrong, but is he now talking about hollow-point bullets rather than AR-15s? Because my understanding is that a normal bullet from an AR-15 doesn’t do this, but a hollow-point from any weapon does.

Also, my understanding is the exact opposite of what he said. Hollow-point bullets are banned for military use because nobody really wants to use them for that purpose anyway. On the battlefield you don’t want to kill the enemy’s soldiers; if possible you want to wound them, put them out of action, and make the enemy devote as many resources as possible to their medical care. And if you can get two or three of them with one bullet, that’s lagniappe. It’s in civilian life that you want your bullets to stop as soon as they hit something, so they don’t go through and hit some innocent person who was behind the target.

The .223/5.56 mm round is essentially a .22 caliber round propelled at much higher speeds. A standard 55 grain bullet will exit the muzzle at around 3000 feet per second. It will go through walls, cars, basic ballistic vests, and human bodies. Depending on what it hits inside a body, it may roll and tumble. There are many different bullet configurations ranging from ball to hollow point that will react differently upon contact. There are many reports and videos on this available to anyone with a computer and curiosity.
I always take exception when people say firearms are designed to kill. They are not, they are designed to fire a bullet. Bullets however are sometimes designed to kill.
It should be noted that in many jurisdictions, .223 ammo is not allowed for deer hunting as it is not effective enough for killing humanely.

In generic terms, FMJ rounds are designed to go through, which can lead to unintended strikes behind the target.

Hollow points and soft points are designed to hit, embed, but do more damage in the target (hollow I believe is less damaging than soft because soft hits the surface, flattens and goes through like a ram)

When a bullet passes through tissue two cavities are created.. a larger surrounding temporary cavity as tissue elastically stretches from the shock wave and the smaller central permanent crush cavity of main tissue damage. Some bullets are designed to fragment and send out shards of metal to create more wound channels. Bullet design for hunting and personal defense has rapidly advanced to provide better performance.

Dumdum rounds were banned via the Hague convention for political reasons, not humanitarian reasons. It gave Britain an edge over countries like Germany and they got pissy about it. And the purpose of shooting an enemy is to remove them from the battlefield, not give them an wound that might injure but allow them to remain in the fight.

Actually it’s common for military rounds to be designed to injure, not to kill. The reason is that a severe injury can take up to 4 enemy soldiers out of the fight, caring for the wounded, carrying him back to get help, while killing him outright only takes out 1. It’s part of the terrible calculus of war.

A British officer… Bertie-Clay at the Dum Dum Arsenal in India modified the bullet to have an exposed lead tip (now modern day hunting ammo) which expanded on hitting the enemy.. better wounding, better shock and as such better performance in stopping the enemy.

With the Hague requirements, Britain changed to the Mark VII round with a spitzer (pointed) bullet.. just stable in flight but unstable when hitting flesh and tumbled creating a larger wound channel than a stable bullet.

Actually the 223 round with varmint style bullet is great for home defense as it breaks up easily in plaster wall and doesn’t over-penetrate as handgun bullets can such as 9mm. The AK round 7.62×39 is an overgrown pistol round per se without the hydrodynamic characteristics of a bullet at 3000 fps.

The 223 is just a good varmint class cartridge and no where near the oomph of a main battle rifle cartridge.

The design of the current crop of bullets for .223/5.56 NATO ammunition is rather complicated, but I’ll keep it simple.

First of all, the 5.56×45 round was always considered a sub-munition. It was originally designed as a cartridge to hunt varmints. It is not as powerful as a modern battle rifle cartridge. It has a much smaller cross section, which reduces the permanent wound cavity [which is directly responsible for blood loss, which is, in turn, what most wounds rely upon to cause unconsciousness in an enemy] and the temporary wound cavity which is a product of the velocity of the cartridge [which causes additional tissue damage and shock to surrounding nervous tissue]. In other words, to insure that an enemy is incapacitated, it usually requires more rounds on target with the 5.56 NATO round than with a full power battle cartridge, like the 7.62 NATO round. Also, military bullets need to be able to penetrate armor, as well as hard materials. For this reason, as well as reliability of feeding, most militaries use a full metal jacketed round. Actually, hollow point bullets are not “outlawed” by either the Geneva or Hague Conventions and can be freely used by military units. And, the myth that military leaders want to wound rather than kill an adversary is just that. The whole point of shooting someone is to stop them from harming you. Whether they live or die is irrelevant. This brings us to the bullets used in the 5.56 NATO round.

To increase the wounding characteristics of military rounds, in this caliber, the bullets are designed to become unstable shortly after striking soft tissue. This causes the bullet to tumble inside the human body, which increases the wound channels, causing greater destruction and decreasing the time necessary to incapacitate an enemy. Hollow point rounds usually do not tumble, in flesh, but they may. Hollow points are designed to allow for the frontal surface to expand, thereby increasing the frontal cross-section and deliver greater energy to the target. Light bullets, traveling at extremely high speeds also have a tendency to fragment, as well.

“It also includes telling crowds of gullible college students that lower-income Americans have “the right” to live closer to their jobs and closer to rich people” says the guy raised in one of El Paso’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

I believe that the state of New Jersey passed a law that’s similar to what Beto is suggesting. I think it outlawed millions of currently owned firearms and standard-capacity magazines, and they are subject to confiscation. Is that correct?

If SCOTUS won’t protect the people of New Jersey (and California, New York, Illinois, etc), then would it realistically keep Beto or Harris from enacting confiscation?

I was living in Illinois when the state legislature finally authorized CC permits and was in the first batch permits issued after (was it) 16 hours of classroom instruction and live-fire verification. My memory is hazy, but I believe they were forced to come up with CC laws – they came close to constitutional carry with the date the upper court gave them to enact legislation – but in the end passed a very restrictive CC law. A provision most grievous to me was no carry on gov’t owned land – which included DOT highway rest areas. Damn expensive to get permitted there. I don’t recall whether it was the Supreme court that ordered compliance or Circuit court …

At the time I talked to our village sheriff since I was a transplant from Washington where getting a CC permit is quite simple and inexpensive. He said Illinois was politically divided by I-80 – north of that is the Chicago / Rockford area and suburbs with strict local gun control laws – south of that more rural/ag and gun friendly. He implied law enforcement in the south more or less ignored the goings on of the north. He was one of the “refuse to enforce” law men who honored his oath of office to protect and defend the constitution – including the 2nd amendment.

I suspect that attitude is more common than not in the predominantly red continental US, which if gun confiscation were attempted, the Fed would find no support for it from local law enforcement. Someone really ought put the question to the Dem gun grabbers just whom they intend to send door to door to confiscate guns IF local / county law enforcement stands down … and I imagine most will.

Would the Dems take the extra unconstitutional step of dispatching the US military against the US citizenry?

The biggest problem with the plan to confiscate AR-15 and AK-47 variants is the fact that the grab would not stop there. There are a number of additional military and civilian “hunting” rifles which use the same or similar semi-automatic actions. These would also be subject to confiscation. In order to limit the Assault Waepons Ban to “assault” weapons, the definition of these weapons had to include cosmetic features, such as pistol grip stocks. What happened, was that manufactures began turning out the same weapons, with stocks which did not have a pistol grips, in order to circumvent the ban. So, when Francis says that he is going to take your AR-15 and AK-47, he really means that he is going to take every semi-automatic rifle which is capable of accepting a high capacity magazine, including traditional sporting arms.

California law now encompasses civilian hunting rifles from 1905 since the magazine feed autoloading rifle was first and foremost a civilian design. Militaries were playing with the idea and WWI forced many to buy civilian semiautos… Winchester and Remington to use in the war. Battle doctrine shunned these lower power cartridges. Everything was used by somebody in WWI.

Isn’t it ironic that all of these aspirants to the WH propose many things that are unConstitutional yet there first oath to the highest office in the land is to “Defend and protect the Constitution of the US”!

stoner’s original design for the 16 was a .30 calibre weapon–to replace the m-14–for weight considerations and production costs (much denser steel required for .30 cal weapons vs lighter alunminum-based alloys for .223)the design was changed to .223/5.56–though lighter and cheaper to manufacture, the 16 had significant operational issues, particularly in extreme environments, where even modest amounts of water/particulates/grunge could cause malfunctions/render the weapon unusable–no thanks

ak any day–considerably more knockdown power/hard target penetration–lower cyclic rate and not as accurate to 400 metres true but in almost any situation requiring automatic weapons(small arms)rate of fire and range(400 metres and beyond)are secondary considerations against knockdown power and reliability–with the added bonus that in many parts of the world if you’re carrying an ak, your opponent is carrying your ammo for you

I didn’t watch, but I’m guessing none of Francis’s fellow Democrats took him to task for his extreme positions on guns. His campaign may be in “try anything” mode, but it’s instructive that neither the candidates nor the moderators thought confiscation was objectionable enough to even comment on, much less stake out a position in opposition to.

This is the first time in my life that Demorat candidates are telling the truth about what they will do if elected. This group must be like the cursed girl in the fairy tale movie that had to do what she was told to do. Only this group is telling the truth even though they will never get elected by doing so. I simply do not know who they think they are pleasing with their promised horrible programs.